The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser, first published in 1998 by Crown Publishers, Inc., New York City. It is a collection of short stories, some of which were published by various journals, such as The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, and The New Yorker. It continues in a similar vein to Millhauser's previous efforts that mix the extraordinary into everyday life.
"If a story is an artifact composed of a certain amount of darkness and a certain amount of light, I suppose it’s true that this collection is somewhat darker than the earlier ones. The reasons for this are obscure to me, though, so far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with some darkening sense of the human condition, or any such ponderous thought”—Steven Millhauser on The Knife Thrower and Other Stories in a 2001 Transatlantica interview with critic Marc Chénetier .[1]
Acknowledging that the stories in the collection are “charmingly written,” New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani complained that “they feel more like tired exercises designed to showcase Millhauser's baroque powers of description.”[2] Kakutani adds:
The reader, sated with this volume's repetitious descriptions of the odd, the mysterious and the disturbing might understand how even the marvelous can become banal.[3]
Millhauser's world is the imaginary world that once held angels and demons, mythic beasts and gardens, heaven and hell. The imagery of our human frontiers, upward and downward—the blue heaven above and the cavern below—appears with surprising constancy in his tales.</ref>Byatt, 1998</ref>[4]
Retrospective appraisal
Describing the stories in The Knife Thrower as “classic Millhauser,” literary critic Earl G. Ingersoll reports that the volume signals an advance over his previous short fiction:
{{blockquote|The presence of “The New Automaton Theater” in this collection highlights the more sophisticated, often deeper representations readers of Millhauser have become accustomed to.[5]
Ingersoll reminds readers that though “The New Automaton Theater” (1981) is the author’s first published story, it was not included in his first collection, In the Penny Arcade (1985), as its theme concerning automaton-making was treated in “August Eschenburg” (Antaeus, Spring 1984).[6]
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